OPINION:
This might be Joe Biden’s time at last.
Just when everyone is watching the Republican candidates stretch the gamut from serious drama to outrageous farce, Joe’s confrontation with tragedy gives him gravitas and focuses the rest of us on his character. It’s just possible he could defeat the “inevitable” Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, and even make it difficult for the ultimate Republican candidate.
In an interview with Stephen Colbert the other night the veep emphasized the importance of empathy, of understanding the experience, attitudes and emotions of others, a quality scarce among politicians (and nearly everybody else). He explained how he was tutored in empathy by his two sons, Hunter and the late Beau, who kept him from suffering a hardened political facade or an approach to politics that channels human emotions into canned emotional sound bites.
The vice president described how once, after he finished talking to 70 million people, his sons, alone with him, spoke of what’s important. “Look at us, dad,” they said. [We] are your home base. Remember who you are.” Joe has never wandered far from that home base.
The conversation with Stephen Colbert was remarkable because it lacked the emotional cant we’ve grown accustomed to hearing from leaders when they speak of family, faith and community. When he was asked how he kept the counsel of his soul in a political city populated by talented liars, he gave a succinct answer. “I commuted back to Delaware every night.”
Suddenly we remembered why the Founding Fathers expected members of Congress to live in their home states rather than in Washington, to stay in touch with their roots. As Washington grew, Congress spent increasing time in the capital, losing a sense of what’s important in the home base.
At the moment Hillary Clinton is flooding the social media with nostalgic photographs of her as a younger woman, to remind female fans how she was “fighting for women” before feminism was cool. From Wellesley, Yale Law School, the Children’s Defense Fund and trying to reform public schools as first lady of Arkansas, she had the women’s backs, or so she says.
“The pictures of her early years are important in telling her story, where she came from, the moments that shaped her life,” Jim Margolis, her media adviser, tells Politico. “It’s not just talk, it’s not more promises, but you can count on her to fight for you, because that’s what she’s always done.”
But nostalgia is a double-edged nail file for Hillary, because the numbers of voters who simply don’t trust her are growing. Her past reminds them of why. Recent polls testify to a dramatic decline in support from women. A remarkable 71 percent of Democratic-leaning women said in a Washington Post-ABC News poll in July they planned to vote for her. Only 42 percent say that today. Even more troubling are the accompanying interviews, with the reasons why women feel as they do.
Maya Chenevert, a community college student in Columbus, Ohio, tells The Washington Post how her excitement for Hillary went back to 2008, when she was 13 years old. She was as excited as her mother about the prospect of Hillary as the first woman president. The grownup Maya is shorn of her illusions, and has persuaded her mother that Hillary is no longer the “right woman.”
The bloom has faded from the rose of the idea that the former first lady, former senator, former secretary of state can be that “right woman.” The battle cry, “Ready for Hillary,” always meant “ready for a woman,” but the mites and thrips have nibbled at the faded rose. Her explanation of why she needed a personal email server, when no one else can have one, leaves her with deep scars and diminished luster.
The extensive experience that Hillary added to her resume as secretary of state was undercut by her need to protect her records from the public. She has been in this place before. Records of her work at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, which might have answered questions about the Whitewater scandal, and the sacking of the employees of the White House travel office so their jobs could go to friends, were “lost,” and later mysteriously reappeared at the White House. A younger generation would never have been reminded of all that but for the personal email server. Even women who like Hillary are now saying she’s “too divisive,” “shows “bad judgment,” and “can’t be trusted.” Not exactly what voters look for in a president.
If the issue for Democratic voters becomes character and integrity, and decide that Hillary has none, it’s Joe Biden they may look to to come to the aid of the party.
• Suzanne Fields is a columnist for The Washington Times and is nationally syndicated.
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